Miralicious’s Reviews > The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation > Status Update

The abridged version of this is so unrelentingly depressing that it’s hard to imagine finishing the unabridged version. Just how bad was it? Frequently, the author alludes longingly to how good things were during the previous monarchy and serfdom. And he was a committed communist (until several years into his gulag imprisonment).

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

“As for me, I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites…were too few for me. Too few. Here my cry would be heard by two hundred…but what about the two hundred million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the two hundred million. But for the time being, I did not open my mouth and the escalator dragged me implacably down into the netherworld.”

“A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Just snagged this one in audiobook form on Chirp books for $4.99. For almost 22 hours of narration, it seemed like a pretty good deal to me—I just have to finish my Modern History of Iran and then I’m on to this bad boy…